Barack Obama has abandoned a commitment to veto a new security law
that allows the military to indefinitely detain without trial American
terrorism suspects arrested on US soil who could then be shipped to Guantánamo Bay.

Human
rights groups accused the president of deserting his principles and
disregarding the long-established principle that the military is not
used in domestic policing. The legislation has also been strongly
criticised by libertarians on the right angered at the stripping of
individual rights for the duration of "a war that appears to have no
end".

The law, contained in the defence authorisation bill that funds the US military,
effectively extends the battlefield in the "war on terror" to the US
and applies the established principle that combatants in any war are
subject to military detention.